experimentally, and felt nothing at all.
Burned. The flesh was destroyed.
The elemental on the far side of the palace was doing its damage. It lit up the night sky, and by that light, Shadoath knelt on all fours in the reflecting pool and peered at her ruined face.
Her right eye was a milky white orb, nestled in a swollen socket of bloody meat. Her left eye was cloudy at the center. Her right ear was burned away, along with most of her hair.
The flesh of both of her hands was cooked.
But none of that mattered.
For at the moment she was mindless with agony. Gone were all thoughts of revenge or escape or of rescuing her daughter.
Shadoath wished for the release offered by death, but with hundreds of endowments of stamina, death would not come.
Myrrima rushed toward the rangits. One escaped prisoner, a man whose back was lashed and shredded, had found their rangits tied to a tree, and now he struggled to untie one.
“Sir,” Myrrima said, “those are for the children.”
The fellow leapt up at the sound of her voice, terrified, and for a moment Myrrima feared that she would have to fight him for a mount, but he looked at her, at the children, and nodded his head stupidly, then ran toward the woods.
Myrrima found that Fallion was too weak to hold on, so she set him in the saddle with Shadoath’s daughter. And since Jaz still fought her and cried for Shadoath, Myrrima did not trust him to ride alone. She put him on a mount in front of her, and clung to him, hoping that in time he would regain his senses.
Now she saw that there were two spare rangits. A pregnant girl of perhaps fifteen came and mounted one. Myrrima took the other to use as a palfrey, so that the mounts could take turns getting a rest, and off they went, the rangits bouncing down the dirt road, then floating up again.
Behind them, Shadoath could be heard shrieking in mortal agony, and the sky was ablaze. Smoker’s elemental seemed intent on igniting the world.
39
Our rage may give us power, even as it diminishes us.
Fallion rode in a hot fury. Thick fog hid everything, the road ahead and the inferno behind, but Fallion could feel the flames licking the night sky behind him, and it took little to reach out with his powers and summon the heat, use the energy to renew his own depleted strength.
Numb with pain and fatigue, Fallion wasn’t even sure how he’d gotten here, riding a rangit with Valya’s arms holding him tightly, but for a moment he resented the pain. Each time the rangit hit the ground, the jarring threatened to dislocate his bones.
His eyes itched and his head ached, and at that moment, he wanted nothing more but to fall back into unconsciousness.
On the road ahead, he saw men rushing up out of the fog, or something like men. Golaths, their warty gray skin sagging around their breasts and bellies.
“Clear the way!” Myrrima shouted to them. “Clear the way! The prisoners have escaped.”
The golaths leapt out of her way, fearing that some dire soldier would ride them down. And after the prisoners passed, the golaths stood beside the road peering at their backs in wonder.
Let them try to stop us, Fallion thought, summoning heat from Smoker’s inferno. Let them try.
“Stop that,” Myrrima said from the rangit that raced beside them.
“What?”
“Don’t give in,” Myrrima whispered. “Don’t give in to your rage.”
Fallion tried clinging to the saddle as the rangit bounced ahead, and his mind seemed to spin.
He’d asked Shadoath what she wanted, and she had not answered. Only now was he really certain.
She’d wanted the sleeper to awaken. She’d wanted him to summon the fire, to lose himself.
But why? What would the loci hope to gain from him?
Did they want him to join them? Or did they need something else from him?
Behind them, Smoker’s inferno was raging, roaring in intensity. The fire crackled the bones of his enemies and sent clouds of smoke spewing into the heavens.
Smoker had given himself to the flames so that Fallion would not have to.
I’m a fool, Fallion thought in dismay, and he tried to let go of his rage. He sagged against the rangit, struggling for the moment to remain a child.
When the riders reached the mountain pass, they came up out of the fog and the rangits found themselves on a clear road, hopping by starlight.
In the valley behind them, the palace was aflame and Smoker’s elemental was dutifully attacking the barracks, blasting row upon row of tents, sending out fingers of flames that seemed to have an intelligence all their own, pure malevolence bent on destruction.
The whole valley seethed like a hornet’s nest.
Myrrima could hardly believe that a single wizard could cause so much annihilation.
At the edge of the woods, she got off her mount and drew a rune in the dirt, one that would lock the valley below in fog for a week.
Then she lit a torch and they were off again. She worried about patrols in the woods, even though she and Smoker had done their best to take care of that.
So they raced for hours under the starlight. They picked up some strengi-saats as they rode. The great beasts snarled in the woods, and floated behind them like shadows, leaping from tree to tree.
Myrrima shivered and kept the children close. Jaz quit fighting her after a while, and seemed to realize who she was, and that she was taking him to safety. He clung to her and wept.
“I’m sorry,” Jaz said over and over again.
“You’ve no need to be sorry,” Myrrima said.
“I got Smoker killed. Shadoath was so beautiful. I wanted to be with her.”
“Don’t feel bad,” Valya told Jaz in a soothing tone. “I’ve seen grown men give themselves to her that way, thanking her even as she twisted a blade into their hearts. Beauty was just another of her weapons.”
Myrrima worried at that, wondering what kinds of things Valya might have seen.
After two hours, a half-moon rose, adding a wan tone of silver to the night.
With a clear road, the rangits picked up speed, and the faster they hopped, the less jarring the ride became.
They neared town just an hour before dawn.
Fallion seemed to sleep most of the way, until they reached the docks, where Captain Stalker and some of his men were waiting with a ship’s boat.
They transferred the children into the boat, and Stalker peered up the road.
“Smoker comin’?” he asked, his voice tinged with worry.
“I’m afraid not,” Myrrima said. “His elemental burnt down the palace and set flames to at least half the camp.”
“Ah, he always was one of the good ones,” Stalker said. “Don’t know how I’ll ever replace him.”
A good flameweaver, Myrrima thought. She’d never met one that she would have called good before, but
